N0CNSR · Politics

One right decision doesn't buy absolution

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

My take: Trump got Venezuela right. He fucked up with Iran. And when it comes to fucking Russia, he's a complete asshole. Those opinions can coexist. Getting one thing right doesn't buy you a lifetime exemption from being called a piece of shit.

And Elon Musk? His company has just given me another reason to call him a cowardly bastard. This is about the night of October 13–14, 2026. Ukrainian officials reported that SpaceX imposed restrictions on moving Starshield terminals without warning, disrupting combat drone missions. The initially reported cutoff was around 160 km/h; Sternenko later relayed reports of connection losses at 60–70 km/h. This isn't a claim that all Ukrainian Starlink service went dark. It's about restrictions hitting military operations, including strikes against Russian logistics on occupied Ukrainian territory.

I suspect political pressure. But there is no independent evidence that the White House ordered the change, and I haven't seen proof that Musk personally ordered it or that these restrictions caused specific deaths. If he made that call and Ukrainian troops died because of it, then, in my view, he has their blood on his hands. Calling it a service restriction doesn't make the consequences harmless. Someone else gets to face them in a trench.

I hope Trump ends up in prison. At the very least. But Trump isn't as bad as Putin. In my ranking of political evil, Putin is number one. Then Iran's ruling bastards. Then that fat North Korean dictator. Trump comes fourth.

I don't owe either Trump or Musk loyalty because I once agreed with something they did. I'm judging the decisions. And I'm sick of powerful men gambling with lives they will never have to live.

Your principles end where the discount begins

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

You have very firm convictions. As long as they don't cost you anything.

In conversation, you're against corruption, exploitation, and every other kind of nastiness. In the comments, you're uncompromising. But then someone you know offers to sort things out through a contact, and suddenly life turns out to be more complicated than black and white.

Especially when you're the one who needs to skip the queue.

I like watching how quickly the vocabulary changes. Someone else's bribe is corruption. Yours is a token of gratitude. Someone else's connections are nepotism. Yours are normal human relationships. Someone else's silence was bought. You're just being professional and keeping work separate from politics.

Every convenience gets its own tidy name. So you never have to put two sentences next to each other: “I condemn this” and “I benefit from this.”

Together, they look pretty fucking bad. Separately, they fit perfectly well into the same biography.

I don't believe in spotless purity. You can live inside a system you didn't choose. Use infrastructure you can't do without. Work somewhere you can't yet afford to leave.

The world doesn't give everyone the same set of alternatives. A refusal that costs one person a minor inconvenience might leave another without food or medical care. Pretending those are the same decisions is the convenient cruelty of a comfortable observer.

But somehow necessity often keeps going long after the nice little perks have begun.

You won't lose your home without this deal. You won't be left without a means of supporting yourself. It just pays more. Or gets your paperwork processed faster. Or buys you an exception nobody else is entitled to.

And now you've got a speech ready about how you can't live in a society and be free of it.

Mate, you're using philosophy to cover for a discount. Let's at least not turn your savings into a tragedy of the human condition.

The most uncomfortable test starts with a question: what have you already turned down because of your convictions?

Not what you posted. Not who you blocked. What opportunity did you pass up? What money didn't you take? What convenience did you decide to go without?

This isn't a mandatory public report. Nobody needs to post receipts for their morality. But if you can't answer that question when you're alone with yourself, maybe your principles have simply happened to align with your interests so far.

It happens. It's just not yet the strength of character you're so proud of.

Next usually comes the hunt for someone else's imperfections. Where do you shop, then? What phone do you have? Who do you pay taxes to? You're desperate to find some compromise the other person has made that will let you stop discussing your own decisions altogether.

But someone else's inconsistency doesn't make your deal a good one. They might have a problem of their own. Now there are two. Congratulations: your investigation added more questions instead of answering the first one.

You don't have to become a saint to refuse one specific piece of bullshit you're capable of refusing right now.

I think it helps to know in advance exactly what you won't do. Before they've shown you the number. Because once you've seen the number, your brain suddenly becomes a very talented lawyer.

And if the boundary does move, you can at least call it your choice. I agreed. It benefited me. I didn't want to lose the opportunity. Without the story about how the universe itself cornered you into this premium package of perks.

Then decide whether you're happy with the person who made that choice.

Your principles don't have to cause you the maximum possible pain. Suffering by itself doesn't make anyone more honest. But sometimes a principle really does cost you something, and that's when you find out whether you have it at all.

As long as the choice is free, you can be very loud.

Then someone offers you a discount. And suddenly the room gets remarkably quiet.

“I'm not political.” Until they come for you.

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

“I'm just not interested in politics.”

Fucking fantastic. It's interested in you.

It's interested in how much you earn. What you read. What you write. Where you go. And whether it can send you off to die without spending too much time persuading you.

But go on. Tell me you have other interests.

I understand wanting a quiet life. Working, minding your own business, loving someone, planning a vacation. I don't want to wake up wondering what some assholes with authority have done this time either.

But for some reason, my not wanting to keep an eye on them doesn't make them cease to exist.

That's what pisses me off about your favorite line. You say “I'm not political” as though you've signed a separate agreement with the state. You leave it alone, it leaves you alone. All discussed, hands shaken, everyone goes their separate way.

Show me the agreement.

Especially the clause where it promised to hold up its end.

What does your “not political” usually mean, anyway?

Your job is still paying you. Your card hasn't been blocked yet. Flights are still going somewhere. Your favorite bar still serves a cocktail whose name the bartender pronounces more confidently than you do.

So life is manageable.

Someone got locked up? Well, we need to know the full story. Something got banned? I didn't use it anyway. Another news outlet shut down? I don't read the news, it's all negativity.

A convenient way to assess what's happening.

As long as nobody has taken anything away from you personally, apparently nothing particularly terrible has happened.

And then you call yourself objective.

This line especially cracks me up:

“Don't drag politics into everyday life.”

It's already fucking there.

In your paycheck and how much of it is left after buying groceries. In your ability to start a business. In your ability to keep it if someone takes a liking to it. In your kid's school. In the passport you're holding at the border.

You can go your entire life without watching a political debate. But when you're banned from leaving the country, nobody is going to take your magnificent detachment into account.

There won't be a separate line for people who just wanted to do graphic design.

And no, I'm not suggesting everyone read the news around the clock.

You can know every minister's surname and still spend your entire life with your tongue up your ass. You can argue in comment sections for eight hours a day and decide that by evening you've practically overthrown a dictatorship.

You just wore yourself the fuck out on the internet.

What interests me is something else. Do you understand the conditions you're living under? Can you see where things are heading? Do you have any line at all beyond which you'll stop explaining to yourself why everything is still fine?

Or can that line always move a little further?

Because right now there's the mortgage. Then an important project. Then your kid starts school. Then it's too late to change anything.

Amazing how life always comes up with a reason to do nothing, right on time.

And yet you're perfectly capable of taking an interest in the rules when you want to protect your money.

Before buying an apartment, you check the paperwork. Before making a deal, you study the contract. If someone owes you ten thousand, suddenly you discover principles, spare time, and the ability to ask uncomfortable questions.

But when it comes to people who can rewrite the rules of your entire life, suddenly it's:

“Oh, I don't understand any of that.”

Then learn a little.

You spent half the evening comparing two practically identical phones. Doesn't the way your own life works deserve at least as much attention?

There's another version. A more honest one.

“I understand everything. I'm just scared.”

That I can understand.

Scared of losing your job. Scared for the people you love. Scared they really will come for you over something you said. There are circumstances where any action comes at a steep price, and telling someone from a place of safety how nobly they should risk their life is cheap.

But then say that.

I'm scared. I'm dependent. I don't see a way out yet.

Why put on this cardboard crown of someone who's supposedly too busy with real life to bother with some silly thing called politics?

You understand everything, and you're trying not to look.

At least stop bullshitting yourself.

And sometimes it isn't even fear.

You're just benefiting from it.

A good position. Useful connections. A contract you don't want to give up. The chance to live a little better if you know when not to ask another question.

That's when you really need a philosophy.

“It's complicated.” “We don't know the whole truth.” “Nothing we do makes a difference.”

Funny how many intellectual obstacles appear between a person and the obvious when the obvious might fuck with their income.

You can choose money. People choose money all the time.

But don't pretend afterward that you never made a choice at all.

Then one day, something happens that affects you directly.

Not someone in the news. Not a distant acquaintance. Not somebody else's son.

You.

And suddenly it turns out laws can be unjust. The state can lie. The TV is spouting some completely fucking deranged shit. Human rights, apparently, are actually pretty useful.

The questions start.

“How can they do this?”

“Why isn't anyone doing anything?”

“Where is everyone?”

Everyone has a job. A family. A loan. They're not interested in politics.

You were the one explaining how normal that was.

That's exactly why this smug “it doesn't concern me” disgusts me so much.

Because today people say it about someone else's disaster. Tomorrow that same line is waiting for yours.

You spent years being glad the trouble was happening to someone else. Got used to scrolling past, closing the tab, changing the channel. Then you found yourself in a news story everyone else scrolls past just as calmly over breakfast.

You really want them to be more attentive than you were.

Braver.

More principled.

To somehow stop being “not political” just for you.

I don't expect everyone to become a hero. But an adult should at least understand the cost of political apathy before calling it a neutral position.

Silence can be a way to survive. Leaving can be a way to refuse to participate. Preparing to leave can take time. Helping others doesn't require a public report at all.

Circumstances differ.

But the fairy tale about living in a separate reality where what's happening around you has nothing to do with you is always the same.

You can stay out of the conversation.

You can avoid the news.

You can even ban your friends from discussing any of it in your kitchen because you don't want to spoil the evening.

But when there's a knock at the door, “we don't talk politics here” somehow isn't going to help.

Your evening will be ruined anyway.

Four years

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Four years.

You stayed there for four fucking years.

You could have left.

You didn't.

Because you were fine.

A war?

Well, a war.

People getting killed?

Shit happens.

Someone got mobilized?

Wasn't you.

Someone got thrown in prison?

Wasn't you either.

You worked.

Got paid.

Paid taxes.

Went to restaurants.

Made plans.

Bought apartments.

Drank your fucking pumpkin matcha lattes at Patriarch's Ponds.

And life was still good enough to stay.

Four years.

And now people are talking about mobilization again.

And suddenly:

“We need to get the fuck out.”

Really?

Seriously?

You finally noticed the war?

Or did you just finally realize that the war might notice you?

And please don't start telling everyone how you've been against all of this the entire time.

I don't give a fuck what you supposedly felt inside.

I care about what you did.

And what you did was exactly fuck all.

As long as someone else was paying the price.

Someone else's home.

Someone else's life.

Someone else's children.

Someone else's mobilization.

Someone else's prison cell.

None of that was enough to get your ass moving.

But the possibility of getting your own draft notice?

Suddenly that's enough.

What an incredible fucking coincidence.

And you know what?

Part of me wishes the borders had been closed to people like you.

Yes.

Because as far as I'm concerned, if you had the means to leave this system but consciously chose to spend four years living in it, working in it, and funding it through your taxes, you don't suddenly become uninvolved just because now you're scared for your own skin.

Leaving Russia doesn't erase your responsibility for those four years.

Not the same responsibility as the person pulling the trigger.

Not the same responsibility as the person giving the order.

But your favorite little fairy tale of “I had absolutely nothing to do with any of this” can fuck right off too.

You were there.

You could have left.

You chose to stay.

And now you're moving to other countries.

And that's the part that pisses me off even more.

Because people already live there who left in 2022.

Or earlier.

Some left back in 2014.

They spent years building new lives.

Learning languages.

Dealing with paperwork.

Finding jobs.

Paying for relocation.

Giving up the lives they knew.

Because they decided they no longer wanted to stay.

And now you show up.

Another wave of “I'm not political.”

And locals look at all of us the same way.

Who cares when you left?

Who cares why?

Another Russian just showed up.

Thanks a fucking lot.

People who left years ago now have to explain all over again that no, they didn't come here to wait out another mobilization scare.

Because of people like you, suspicion falls on everyone.

And the funniest part?

I'm almost certain plenty of you still haven't actually decided shit.

You didn't come to build a new life.

You came to wait it out.

Just like last time.

Three months.

Four.

Watch what happens.

Read the news.

Make sure nobody is coming for you yet.

And then go back.

To Moscow.

Back home.

Back to Patriarch's Ponds.

Back to your fucking latte.

Until next time.

And then you'll be posting again:

“Guys, where can I move quickly right now?”

Nowhere, fuckers.

The only place you're headed is the morgue.